What IT Professionals Really Want: It's All About the Money

A recent survey conducted by Marc J. Schiller in conjunction with CIO Insight reveals that IT professionals are ready to stand up and say: "Show me the money."

Two weeks ago I put forth the position that the reason IT leaders don't get what they want from their careers is because they don't really know what they want. (Read about it here.)

To help prove or disprove my position, I reached out to CIO Insight readers and members of my personal mailing lists and asked them to participate in a survey with one simple question: What do you most want from your professional career? We received 160 responses across a range of IT and business positions.Respondent Profile

CIOs

19.4%

Senior IT Managers

33.3%

IT Managers

17.8%

Project Managers

9.3%

Non-managerial IT professionals

20.2%

Note: total 160 respondents

IT Pros: What We Learned

To make the answers as meaningful as possible, participants were
required to choose a first, second and third response from more than 16
choices. (Respondents also had to option to write in a choice of their
own-although fewer than two percent chose to do so.)

The goal in providing so many choices with only slight variations
between them was to "force" IT pros to reveal the exact nature of what
they want most from their careers. No hiding behind broad statements
like "career advancement" or "challenging work environment."

The top three survey choices for all IT respondents, from non-managerial IT pros to CIOs, were:

I want to make more money

I want to be more influential

I want a seat at the table

In absolute terms, 129 of the 160 IT pros who participated in this survey (over 80 percent) chose one of the above items as either their first, second or third choice.